Boko Haram attacks kill 145 in northeastern Nigeria

(CNN)At least 145 people were killed after Boko Haram militants raided three villages in the northeastern Nigerian state of Borno, witnesses said Thursday.

The Islamist militant group's attack late Wednesday in the Kukawa fishing village killed 97 people, resident Kawu Aisaye told CNN.

A senior Nigerian military official confirmed the attack, adding the military conducted airstrikes following the raid and is sending troops to assess the damage.

The official was unable to provide details about casualties.

A lawmaker in the region, Mohammed Tahir, told CNN that Boko Haram killed 48 people and injured 11 others Wednesday when the militants stormed two other villages near the town of Monguno.

Boko Haram, which loosely translates to "Western education is sin" in the Hausa language, is classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. It has been brutal against civilians and authorities alike as it tries to impose its extreme version of Sharia law over an expansive territory.

Residents of Borno state, which borders Chad, and other parts of northeastern Nigeria know this all too well. For years they have dealt with Boko Haram assaults, bombings, abductions and mass kidnappings -- the most infamous being the taking of more than 200 schoolgirls in the town of Chibok in 2014.

Earlier this year, Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS.

Journalist Aminu Abubakar in Kano, Nigeria, contributed to this report.

Car assembly line robot kills worker in Germany

(CNN)An automotive assembly line robot killed a worker at a car factory in Germany this week, a prosecutor's office said.

The man, 21, was installing the robot at a Volkswagen assembly line on Tuesday in Baunatal, which lies next to the city of Kassel, local newspaper the Hessische Niedersaechsische Allgemeine reported, citing a VW spokesman. The robot gripped and pressed him up against a metal plate, crushing his chest.

Despite efforts to revive him, the worker, an employee of a third-party vendor, died at a hospital, the paper reported.

As a matter of procedure necessary to have the body released in cases of non-natural death, the state prosecutor's office said it is investigating to rule out any criminal culpability.

Volkswagen did not respond to calls for comment Thursday.

Liberia announces two more confirmed Ebola cases

Health officials told AFP the infected pair had been in physical contact with the 17-year-old victim before his death on Sunday in a village near the country's international airport, around an hour's drive southeast of Monrovia.

"One hundred and two contacts have been identified, although that number is expected to increase as investigations continue," the World Health Organization (WHO) said in its latest report on the epidemic.

"At this stage the origin of infection is not known. The case reportedly had no recent history of travel, contact with visitors from affected areas, or funeral attendance."

Cestus Tarpeh, a spokesman for the health department where the boy died, confirmed the two new patients had tested positive and said the authorities were awaiting the results of further blood tests on other contacts.

The news came a day after Health Minister Bernice Dahn announced the first Ebola infection in Liberia for more than three months, warning that it was "likely that we will find additional cases".

Authorities have warned that a herbalist who treated the boy had evaded the authorities and was on the run.

Moses Massaquoi, the head of the Liberian government's Ebola crisis management department, said 14 conventional health workers among the identified contacts had placed themselves in voluntary quarantine.

The new outbreak comes with the country still reeling from a nightmarish epidemic which wrecked its health service and economy and left 4,800 Liberians dead.

Before the new cases Liberia had reported its last victim on March 20 and was declared Ebola-free on May 9.

- 'So scared' -

Neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone are both still battling the epidemic, which has killed more than 11,200 people in 18 months across west Africa.

US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield told a news conference broadcast online from Washington that the new Ebola death was "a warning to us that the job is not done".

Residents in Monrovia, a crowded chaotic city of around one million people, spoke of their fears that the Margibi outbreak would develop into a full-blown epidemic.

"I am scared -- I am so scared that I don't even know where to start," said Jeneba Freeman, 45, a stallholder in the capital's Redlight market.

Ebola is spread among humans via the bodily fluids of recently deceased victims and people showing symptoms of the tropical fever, which include vomiting, diarrhoea and -- in the worst cases -- massive internal haemorrhaging and external bleeding.

Experts have speculated that the 17-year-old, who has not been named, could have been infected by an entirely new variant of the virus from an animal such as a fruit bat, rather than from a human.

A more worrying possibility is that clusters of Ebola continue to smoulder under the surface, far from the gaze of local or international health authorities.

- Infectious bodies -

"We heard on radio that Ebola has turned around to come back to Liberia," said Samanta Blamo, 55, another stallholder at the Redlight market, where buckets of chlorinated water began to appear on Wednesday.

"This is why we are bringing our Ebola buckets. We were still washing our hands but only few buckets were here. Now everybody has one again, just like the way it was in 2014."

During the months of peak transmission from August to November last year Liberia was the setting for some of the most shocking scenes from the outbreak, by far the worst in history.

The country was reporting more than 300 new cases a week, with uncollected and highly infectious bodies piling up in the streets of Monrovia.

The health system -- embryonic before the crisis, with some 50 doctors and 1,000 nurses for 4.3 million people -- was devastated, losing 192 health workers out of 378 infected.

Schools remained shut after the summer holidays, unemployment soared as the formal and black-market economies collapsed and clinics closed as staff died and non-emergency healthcare ground to a halt.

Parents found themselves on Wednesday mulling the dilemma of whether to curtail the end of an already hugely disrupted school year by keeping their children at home.

Patricia Sleboh, a mother-of-three, told AFP she would rather keep her children from classes than risk "losing them to Ebola".

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APC and the other side of merger

The governing All Progressives Congress (APC) has not been itself since the inauguration of the 8th Senate about three weeks ago. The election of the new officers of the National Assembly, all of whom were opposed by a section of the party leadership, has thrown the party into a state of turmoil that is now rocking the party to its foundations.

By Jude Opara

Against the position of the party, Senator Bukola Saraki from Kwara State, North Central Nigeria was elected as the Senate President while Rep. Yakubu Dogara from Bauchi State, North East Nigeria emerged as the Speaker of the House of Representatives. The party wanted Senator Ahmed Lawan from Yobe State, North East Nigeria as the Senate President and Rep. Femi Gbajabiamila from Lagos State, South West Nigeria as the Speaker.

The crisis that rocked the party also cost it the opportunity of producing the Deputy Senate President as Senator Ike Ekweremadu of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) emerged in what many analysts say was a direct consequence of the insistence of the APC leadership not to allow the legislators a free way in the election of their principal officers.

APC National Leader Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu discussing with President Muhammadu Buhari and National Chairman of APC Chief John Oyegun during APC Joint Leadership Meeting held in Abuja. Photo by Gbemiga Olamikan.

Many critics have also flayed Senator Saraki and Mr. Dogara for what they their aspirations inputting that the two men should have stayed quiet in the face of the seeming bias of the party against the two of them.

The APC is a coalition of four political parties that wanted to wrestle power from the then ruling PDP. The Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), the Congress for Progressives Change (CPC), the New PDP as well as a fraction from the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA).

Looking at the major players behind these political parties, one could easily notice that they came to the party with different ideologies and agenda. One could argue that the CPC for instance led by General Muhammadu Buhari accepted to go into that alliance because of the difficulty it had in capturing power using only the celebrated anti-corruption disposition of the general.

The ACN led by former Lagos State governor, Senator Bola Tinubu was more interested in widening its scope of control outside the South West where it had held sway since the return of the country to democratic governance in 1999. Since it was difficult to be freely accepted outside the zone, the merger was then necessary.

The ANPP which had former Abia State governor, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu as its chairman at the time of the merger was also fast loosing grip of its strongholds including the Northeast where it had earlier controlled with ease. Therefore to remain relevant, it had to accept the merger.

One of the main fragments of the APC actually came from the former members of the PDP who got disenchanted with the way the then ruling party was conducting its affairs. The issue came to a head when five sitting governors from Rivers, Kano, Kwara, Sokoto and Adamawa States stormed out of the PDP’s convention ground to form what became known as the New PDP.

A faction of the APGA led by the politically restive Imo State governor, Chief Rochas Okorocha who pulled away to join the merger arrangement.

From what has been playing out lately, it is very clear that the groups that formed the APC which has now captured power at the centre did not sit to discuss how to distribute the offices and positions despite winning the March 28 Presidential and National Assembly elections, two clear months before the handover of government on May 29.

If they had taken cognizance of the fact that the party was made up of tendencies from different regions of the country and different political blocs they should have painstakingly worked out how to handle the issue also with the spirit of give and take and above all in the overall national interest.

Unfortunately what has been playing out looks like one or two of the different blocs wanting to either take everything or dictate the pace, leading to exchange of blows by party members in the Senate and the House of Representatives last week.

It is thus not surprising that the opposition PDP is now shouting that the APC seems not to know what to do with power claiming that the party just wanted to capture power without really knowing what to do with it.

A PDP chieftain, Chief Chyna Iwanyanwu in a recent interview with Vanguard described what is happening in the APC as what happens when thieves come to share their loot.

There is another school of thought that strongly believes that without President Buhari, the APC will amount to nothing which means that the party may soon lose what they have should they continue to indulge in the unhealthy infighting.

There is a school of thought that also believes that what is happening in the party is a fall out of the presidential primaries as it is alleged that a party chieftain, Atiku Abubakar worked against the interest of Tinubu as a payback for the latter’s refusal to help his own presidential aspiration.

Yes even as the Senate has managed to name other principal officers with Senator Ali Ndume from Borno, North East emerging as the Senate Majority Leader, it is yet to be seen how the House will navigate the landmines when it resumes on July 21.

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Civil service and governance in Nigeria: Issues and possible solutions

By Ladipo Adamolekun
I would like to congratulate Dr. Goke Adegoroye on the publication of his compendium in two volumes:Governance in Nigeria, Vol. 1 – The Civil Service Pathway and Vol. 2 – Leadership and Political Will. Through this book and his memoirs, Beyond Yours Faithfully (published in 2010), he has followed the footsteps of some retired higher civil servants at the regional/state and federal levels who have published books that have contributed to our understanding of the work of administration in Nigeria.

Adegoroye’s compendium is sharply focused on the machinery of government at the federal level with attention to both the structuring and staffing of the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) of the civil service in particular and the broader public service (federal government agencies and parastatals) in general.

Following conceptual definitional clarifications of state, nation and bureaucracy (public/civil service) at the beginning of Volume 1 (The Civil Service Pathway), Adegoroye asserts correctly that the civil service is a governance institution. Then, he proceeds to discuss the governance challenges for the civil service, including the functioning of civil servants in a constitutional democracy, effective coordination of the work of administration across MDAs, capacity challenge and integrity challenge. He also summarises the specific roles of civil servants in governance.  These include: the workforce of government, the brain-box and institutional memory of the public sector, the bridge across administrations, and the guardian of public interest

Shortcomings in existing structure  of MDAs

He lays out with admirable clarity the shortcomings in the existing structure of MDAs and the assignment of ministerial portfolios and points up the key issues that need to be addressed. Regarding possible solutions, he draws on his extensive insider knowledge and familiarity with international good practices to recommend a maximum of 18 ministries.

Strikingly, his recommendation is close to the 19 that President Buhari’s Transition Committee is reported to have recommended. The modifications he has proposed for strengthening and streamlining the administrative support for the president are sensible and deserve the attention of the Buhari administration.  But I do not think Nigeria needs an Office of the First Lady (Chapter 15 of Vol. 1). I belong to the school of thought that would like the role of Nigeria’s First Lady to revert to what it was before the aberration of the Babangida military presidency.

Adegoroye devotes many chapters of Volume 1 and one of the two chapters in Volume 2 to the staffing and quality of the civil service at its upper stratum (directors, directors-general, and permanent secretaries) and the appointment as well as the functions of the leaders of the central human resources coordination offices – Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF), Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF) and the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC).

He provides strong evidence of poor human resources management, especially as it affects career progression through the directorate levels to the permanent secretary level. Unsurprisingly, a critical dimension to the poor quality of the civil service that he identifies is the problem of pervasive corruption, including collusion between higher civil servants and their political masters (ministers) in mismanaging the budgets of MDAs.

Appointment of permanent  secretaries

On the appointment of permanent secretaries (PSs), Adegoroye uses some illustrative cases to buttress his assertion that the merit principle is subordinated to patronage considerations, ethnicity and concern for state quotas that has favoured “transferees”, that is, officials who transferred from state civil services and federal prastatals to the civil service, especially since 1999.  Evidence that the deployment of PSs is rarely related to their competence, cognate experience and seniority is the frequency of their posting during the last decade: a PS spends an average of 12 months in a ministry before he/she is deployed to another. This means that a minister who served the full four-year tenure of the immediate past president would have had to adjust to four different permanent secretaries.  The record known to this reviewer is a PS who, in 24 months, has worked in five MDAs!  Has the dysfunction in the federal civil service reached this astonishing level?

Unfortunately, the federal civil service also had seven heads between 2007 and 2014, that is, an average of 12-month tenure for each.  Because the head of the civil service has the primary responsibility for the deployment (posting) of permanent secretaries to MDAs, the short tenure of each is the major explanation for the rapid turn-over of PSs and the negative consequences highlighted above. Furthermore, the limited results recorded by reform efforts aimed at improving performance in the civil service during the period is also due, in large part, to the inability of a succession of short-term heads with varying capabilities (summarised in fascinating pen-portraits in the book) to provide effective leadership.

Adegoroye would like the presidential appointment of PSs, Head of Service and chief executive officers of agencies, parastatals and corporations to involve prior screening by a Federal Public Service Council to be established by an Act. Notwithstanding some sound arguments he adduces to support this recommendation, utmost attention to the knowledge, experience and integrity of persons appointed as Head of Service (and I would add a four-year tenure, coterminous with that of a president) and the chair and members of the FCSC would be an effective solution.

In the final analysis, the onus for ensuring quality leadership of the civil service is on the president: just as a people gets the government it deserves, there is a real sense in which a president gets the civil service he deserves.

On corporations and parastatals

However, regarding the corporations and parastatals, there would be need to either expand the mandate of the FCSC to cover them as recommended in the Oronsaye Report or resuscitate the Statutory Corporations Commission as advocated by Chief Philip Asiodu in his illuminating “Foreword” to the book.

The introduction of Tenure Policy in 2009 was intended to ensure steady career progression and leadership succession in the civil service.  In the immediate, the policy was used to clear a peculiar mess in which career progression to the top posts of director and permanent secretary was blocked by long-serving directors and PSs, many of them in post for over ten years.  Effective from January 2010, PSs and directors were to serve a four-year tenure renewable once for a total of eight years, subject to satisfactory performance.  Notwithstanding Adegoroye’s stout defence of Tenure Policy, his frank critique of its implementation confirms this reviewer’s professional viewpoint that it should have been only an ad hoc measure to clear the existing mess.

Besides the non-implementation of tenure review before extension (similar to the widely-acknowledged challenge of reviewing contracted top bureaucrats in many countries), maintenance of the existing Tenure Policy fundamentally undermines the idea of a career service up to the director level.  With the formal assimilation of PSs into the category of political appointees by the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC Act (2008) on Salaries of Political Office Holders, the director level has become the peak of the career civil service. For directors who rise to that level after the normal 26 years prescribed by the FCSC, this would mean nine years of service before retirement by the 35-year service rule.  And for genuine high-flyers, it could mean additional three years, making a total of twelve years at the director level.  It would make eminent sense to reverse the application of Tenure Policy to directors effective from January 2016.  And because PSs are political appointees that serve at the pleasure of a president, Tenure Policy becomes of limited applicability.

For example, in June 1999 the new president retired 60 percent of PSs and seven were removed in 2005 for poor performance.

What Adegoroye’s book reveals about the problem of corruption in the civil service constitutes the justification for his assertion that “the civil service and the political class [are] the problem of Nigeria”. And he is in good company.  According to Zulfikar Bhutto, a former Prime Minister of Pakistan, civil servants and politicians “form the managing personnel of the vast enterprise of getting rich through participation in authority” (cited in The Economist, Aug.22nd 1998). The sordid details of corrupt practices involving civil servants (on their own) and civil servants in collusion with political office holders in Chapters 5 and 9 of Volume 1 make very depressing reading.  Closing all the leakages exposed and effective enforcement of extant rules and regulations for curbing corruption that are detailed in the book must feature prominently in the Anti-corruption Strategy that President Buhari has promised to make public before the end of his first 100 days, that is, before the end of 72 days from today.

Finally, Adegoroye’s overview of public service reform experience between 1999 and 2014 in Chapter 1 of Vol 2 (Leadership & Political Will) sheds light on why the problems he identifies in his book have persisted. And he provides some pointers to the way forward.  Adegoroye asserts that compared to the success recorded in public service reform between 2004 and 2007, “there is now [in 2014] more rot to be cleared within the civil service system” (Vol 2, p. 66).

However, according to him, by 2008, President Yar’Ardua had complained about inheriting a poor quality civil service (Vol. 2, p. 74).  Concretely, then, only patchy achievements were recorded by the reform efforts carried out between 2004 and 2007, notably the widely-acknowledged “pockets of efficiency” such as the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Federal Capital Territory Authority (FCTA) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and in the core civil service, the successful introduction and implementation of Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) in six pilot MDAs. But the poor management of human resources, weak implementation capacity across MDAs and the problem of pervasive corruption in the civil service had not been solved by 2007.

Thus, it was against the backdrop of a persistently poor performing civil service that the Yar’Ardua administration directed the preparation of a comprehensive strategy for rebuilding the public service and transforming it into a world-class service that can implement government policies and deliver quality services to the public in the manner that regional and federal civil services had done from the late fifties through the 1960s to the mid-1970s. The National Strategy for Public Service Reform (NSPSR) was submitted to the federal government in January 2009.  There is some overlap between the desirable next steps reforms highlighted by Adegoroye and the contents of the four-pronged strategy focused on an enabling institutional and governance environment, an enabling socio-economic environment, public financial management reform and civil service administration reform.

Although the Strategy was not formally approved, aspects of it (especially those focused on improving public financial management) were implemented continuously until the Strategy was refreshed and updated at the request of the Jonathan Administration in 2014.

The Federal Government’s Steering Committee on Reform approved the updated NSPSR in March 2015. Making allowance for necessary modifications to the Strategy to take into account the new policy directions of the Buhari Administration, implementation of a Strategy to help the federal government rebuild and transform the civil service into a well-performing institution delivering quality service to the public should begin no later than January 2016.

The undisputable merit of this two-volume compendium is that it addresses an impressive range of issues relating to civil service and governance in Nigeria and the author provides thoughtful and sensible solutions to many of them.  Significantly, too, he provides interesting “windows” on some aspects of current public administration history: a research report on geopolitical distribution of federal career and (non-career) political appointments and some appendices that would be of interest to both students and practitioners of Nigerian public administration. I recommend the book to them as well as to politicians who have the challenge of responding to the unfolding “change” promised by President Buhari.

Ladipo Adamolekun is a Professor of Public Administration, a former Dean of the Faculty of Administration at the Obafemi Awolowo University and a former Lead Public Sector Management Specialist at the World Bank. He is currently an Independent Scholar.

Ladipo Adamolekun is a Professor of Public Administration, a former Dean of the Faculty of Administration at the Obafemi Awolowo University and a former Lead Public Sector Management Specialist at the World Bank. He is currently an Independent Scholar.

70-yr-old, baby among rape survivors treated in Lagos—MIRABEL

Lagos—A 10-month-old baby girl and a 70-year-old woman were among a total of 737 survivors of rape and other forms of sexual assault treated and offered psychosocial support free of charge, in the two years since the Mirabel Centre, the first sexual assault referral centre in Nigeria, opened its doors to victims of sexual assault.

The baby was sexually molested by the father, while the 70-year-old woman was raped by a boy that ran errands for her in the neighbourhood.

Making this and other revelations yesterday in Lagos, Managing Partner, Partnership for Justice, Mrs. Itoro Eze-Anaba, said the increase in reported cases of sexual violence, particularly, child sexual abuse had become a major public concern in the country.

Eze-Anaba who acknowledged that sexual violence has become endemic in this part of the world said Mirabel Centre was established to fill the gap created by one of the biggest challenges in seeking justice for the survivors who often lack reliable support services and verifiable data.

According to her, more revealing is the fact that out of the 737victims, the youngest was a 10-month- old and the oldest 70 years old.

“This number is made up of 17 male clients and 720 female clients. Many of these clients are referred to the centre by the police and the hospital, civil society organisations, government agencies and some just walk into the centre for treatment.

“In Lagos, locations with the highest number of assaults include; Kosofe, 91, Alimosho 128, Ikeja 56, Oshodi-Isolo 72, and Agege 80,” she stated.

She further lamented that the perpetrators of sexual violence in the country act with impunity due to corruption and incompetency in investigation and prosecution of such cases.

Stating that Partnership for Justice offers needed professional care with funding from Justice for All Programme of the Department of International Development, DFID, of the British Council, she frowned that absence of verifiable data and pressures from family and friends has led to many survivors not seeking help nor reporting to the police.

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Air France KLM flight operations grounded at Lagos Airport

By LAWANI MIKAIRU
Air France -KLM flight operations were on Wednesday grounded at the Muritala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, by members of the National Union of Air Transport Employees, NUATE , over outsourcing of Passenger Documentation to Checkport Securities Nigeria Limited by the airline despite the protest of the Union and Nigerian workers of the airline who have been layoff .

Several passengers of the airline billed to go to Paris, France and Amsterdam were seen stranded as they could not do any checking for their flights. The airline had hurriedly paid one month salary into the Bank accounts of the affected workers as against the Four months severance pay demanded by the unions.

The airline in a statement by its Corporate Communications Spokesperson, Mrs Olufunmilayo Ojesina said that the airline had decided to outsource its passenger documentation control activity in Lagos from the 1st of July 2015 because it was a procedure that is already in place at all Air France-KLM stations worldwide as well as other international airlines in Nigeria.

She insisted that the national union, staff representatives and concerned staff were duly informed of the various steps of this project since November 2014 and numerous negotiation meetings were held with their leading unions.

Ojesina added that “Air France-KLM will continue to do its utmost to find an acceptable solution for all parties involved.”

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